A Year Without Magic
by 123Quarters
Summary: After the war, ex-Death Eaters are banished from the wizarding world unless they find someone to vouch for their change of heart. Draco, stranded in Muggle London for the foreseeable future, may have finally found his one shot at redemption.
1. Chapter 1

**A/N:** This story will have 12 chapters, not counting this intro and the epilogue. You see that? I actually know how many chapters are in the story.

I wanted to go ahead and post the intro, but the first chapter will not be up until I get back to college some time in mid-August. Love you all!

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><p><em><strong>A Year Without Magic<strong>_

_An Introduction_

"Father."

He should have expected it, of course.

"Father?"

No, not even expected- he should have _known_.

"_Father._"

He remembered reading about it in the _Prophet_, after all, read the engagement notice all those years ago and even saw pictures of the bouncing babies years later.

"Father, if you don't pay attention I'm going to set your pants on fire _with my mind_."

Draco blinked rapidly, quickly refocusing his attention on the disgruntled eleven-year-old before him. Scorpius was glaring up at his father, hands on his hips and an all-too-knowing look in his gray eyes.

"If you're quite done gaping, it'd be great if you could help me haul this two-ton trunk onto the train," the boy said wryly, "you know, if you're up to it."

Draco was stuck somewhere between being irritated with the little snot and being thoroughly amused at how very like himself the boy had turned out.

"Keep up that attitude and you'll be hauling that trunk all the way back to the house while the train leaves without you," he finally grumbled, grabbing one of the handles while Scorpius took hold of the other.

"Oh, be still, my terrified little heart," Scorpius snarked back.

"You're a haughty little piss, you know that?"

"I'm just _excited_, Father," Scorpius drawled dramatically, rolling his eyes.

Draco dropped his side of the trunk and smirked when the full weight of it dragged his son to the ground. The now-ruffled and irritated Scorpius huffed and glared up at his father, who determinedly picked at his fingernails and ignored the boy on the ground.

"You're an arse!" the boy snapped, hauling himself to his feet.

"And you're only eleven so don't use that sort of language," Draco shot back, reaching out to brush a piece of lint off his son's shoulder. "Now grab your trunk and let's get it to the train before the conductor comes to his senses and leaves without you."

Scorpius grumbled something under his breath that sounded suspiciously like a repetition of his earlier swear, but helped his father haul the trunk to the luggage rack of a train compartment all the same.

"Good lord, what did you pack, you little goblin?" Draco gasped, holding a hand over the stitch in his side.

"Oh, _I _don't know, Dad- maybe a _whole year's worth of clothing_," Scorpius attempted to snark, but the affect was somewhat diminished by his breathless panting.

The two finally managed to straighten up and look around the compartment.

It was smaller than Draco recalled- then again it had been a long time since he'd been on the Hogwarts Express. Aside from the slightly claustrophobic feeling he got from all the snot-nosed brats banging around him, there was also a vague sense of nostalgia. He shook it off and made his way off the train and back to the platform, Scorpius hot on his heels.

He'd never admit how much he'd been dreading this moment- sending Scorpius off for his first year. But…well, time moved on even if you weren't ready for it to do so, and that was a lesson Draco had learned better than a lot of people.

"Alright, Dad, let me have it," Scorpius said, screwing up his face as if expecting something terribly unpleasant.

"Let you have what? What are you talking about?"

Scorpius gave a long-suffering sigh and examined his nails in the same offhand way his father had earlier. "Your long-winded, teary-eyed, I'm-going-to-miss-you-be-a-good-boy speech. Isn't that what fathers do at this moment?"

Draco stared down at the little arse who was so very obviously his son. Same white-blonde hair, same gray eyes, same self-satisfied smirk. It was like staring at the reflection of his eleven-year-old self.

"Alright then, you prat. Here's your speech so pay attention."

Scorpius continued to examine his nails, but Draco could practically see the boy's ears perk up.

"You're going to get away with a lot of cheek because you're a good-looking, charming little bastard. Don't try to get anything past the head mistress though- she's not going to fall for it. Don't walk through the ghosts- it feels terrible. Don't touch any girls until you're at least a fourth year- if you so much as look at them before that time, your brain will melt out of your ears. Don't cut class- you're not bright enough to get away with it. Try out for Quidditch- your puny size and the enjoyment you get from chasing shiny things will make you a good Seeker. Write me every week or else I won't send you money." Draco trailed off, tapping his lips with his forefinger as he thought for a few seconds. "Yeah, that's about it. Well, have fun, don't die, see you next year." He turned smartly on his heel and started off through the crowd, leaving a wide-eyed and stunned Scorpius to stare after him.

When it became clear that his father had no intention of turning around or coming back for him, Scorpius made a mad dash through the crowd, shoving through the other parents and students until he caught the back of his dad's coat and gave an almighty tug.

"Dad! Dad, wait!" he panted, pulling hard on the coat until Draco turned to look down at him with his eyebrows raised high.

"Yeah, what?" Draco asked coolly, trying to keep the smile from breaking onto his lips.

"I- I just…" Scorpius fidgeted, looking around surreptitiously to see if anyone was watching. The coast was clear. He launched himself bodily at his father, wrapping his arms around Draco's waist and squeezing tight. "I'll miss you, Dad. And I'll write you and…and I love you!" he hissed the last bit in a whisper so that none of the passersby would hear.

Draco returned the boy's hug and grinned to himself. They really were too much alike- he'd been just as arrogant and terrified of looking like anancyon his first day. Unlike Scorpius, he'd never pushed the arrogance aside and said anything to his father- something he regretted now. After a final, rib-crunching squeeze, Scorpius let go and hastily took a step back, haughty mask back in place.

"One last thing, Father," he said, sounding like a prince addressing Parliament.

"Yes?" Draco asked, slightly amused.

"You should talk to her."

Scorpius held his father's gaze, but Draco was hardly paying any attention. His mind was racing in a thousand different directions- one of which involved being irritated with how very perceptive his little brat of a son had turned out to be. Talk to her.

_Talk to her_, the boy said, as if it were that simple. As if he could just walk up to her, here of all places, walk up to her and speak. After all these years. Speak to her.

Hear her voice.

After all these years.

The train whistle sounded, high and loud like a banshee scream. Scorpius jumped, eyes widening, and Draco forced his mind to the present.

"You're going to have the time of your life," he said, squeezing Scorpius' shoulder and giving him a reassuring smile. "I'll come to all of your Quidditch matches, and I promise you won't even realize youmisshome-that's how wonderful Hogwarts is. Chin up," he added, knocking his knuckles against the boy's jaw playfully. "Now hurry off before the train actually leaves you!"

Scorpius gave a hysterical bark of a laugh before sprinting for the train doors. Draco watched through the windows as the boy composed himself and glided coolly to the compartment where they'd stowed his trunk. He gave a last glance out the window, met Draco's eyes, and flashed an arrogant grin. The train lurched forward, and Scorpius turned away and started talking to another boy in the compartment.

He was just a child, Draco reminded himself. Scorpius had no idea what he'd asked his father to do- to go _talk to her_. He was so young- he couldn't understand.

Yes, he was just a child. An oddly perceptive one, but a child all the same.

The engine was passing out of the station; it would be out of sight soon.

Draco steeled himself, reached into his pocket and grasped the folded piece of paper there as if it were his only link to this world, turned and looked across the platform, and met her eyes for the first time in seventeen years.


	2. SNEAK PEAKBETA BEGGING

**_A/N: _**Hi, everyone! I know I said this wouldn't be updated til late/mid-August, but this is my way of not-so-subtly begging for a **beta**. This story is taking so much planning and I just can't even- it's not my strong point.

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><p><strong><em><span>THIS IS NOT THE NEXT CHAPTER- THIS IS A SNEAK-PEAK OF CHAPTER SIX (JUNE). Don't read if you don't like spoilers.<span>_**

It was the sort of night little girls dreamed of when they imagined meeting their Prince Charming somewhere in the vaguely distant future- all velvet midnight blue with swirls of stardust and a warm breeze that smelled of the sea. The road ahead was unpaved, winding, lined on either side with sweet-scented berry bushes and flickering lightning bugs.

They had been walking for so long that the irritation of the evening had begun to fade into that sort of forever-quiet, the wonderful stillness that only occurred when two people were immersed in completely separate thoughts yet still walking side-by-side. It was fragile, and neither seemed to realize how comforting it was after the disaster of the earlier birthday dinner and subsequent Slytherin-Gryffindor shit storm.

They walked on, the silence covering them like a thin blanket, and everything was, though unnoticed, quite beautiful.

Long after the park and its electric lights had faded from view, Draco found the need to break the silence.

"Granger, I'd like to ask you something." His voice was quiet, yet it seemed to echo like a gunshot in the night.

Hermione snapped back from her wandering thoughts, glancing at him from the corner of her eye. The stars were quite bright indeed; she could see every contour of his face in the pale light. "Yes?"

The visible corner of his lips twisted downward, hard, and his gray eyes were focused on a point far ahead. "What… This sounds ridiculous…" He sniffed derisively, sounding suddenly much more like his old self. "What do you think happens- after someone dies? What's death like?"

The question was entirely unexpected, and it nearly jerked the breath from her lungs. "What?" she choked, tripping over her own feet and stumbling a few steps.

Malfoy didn't seem to notice her blundering; he was entirely focused on not looking in her direction. "I know you hate answering questions based on theories instead of fact, but I just…I just want to hear what you believe." Hermione righted herself, cheeks burning and head reeling. She had been wracking her brains for a way to dodge the question until- " Please."

She felt unsteady and shaken, but she tried to keep her voice level. "What are you thinking about? Why does it matter?"

A harsh barked laugh answered her. "It _matters _because, if there is a hell or purgatory or some fucking lava-pit in the center of the earth, I'm bound to end up there someday. Weasley was right about that, at least." Malfoy's voice, already strained and callous, had turned positively acidic. "We lived through a war- everyone did things they aren't proud of. I just… I believe I was a bit worse than others."

Hermione balked at this train of conversation. The war was not something she wanted to talk about- she had given up her wand and moved to Muggle London for a reason. "Malfoy, you never actually _did_ anything too terribly during the war. When you had the chance, you didn't turn Harry in, or fight alongside Voldemort in the end," she reasoned, scrambling for anything to dispel his dismal mood.

Visiting your father's grave on your birthday probably was a bit of a downer, all things considered.

He finally looked at her, straight in the eye. "I never did anything right either. I didn't tell them it was Potter, but I didn't deny it. And you and Weasley… I did nothing. Isn't that damnable as well?"

Silence. Thoughtful silence. Hermione remembered all too clearly the Malfoy drawing room, Draco's voice through her panic- _Could be._Two words as good as a death sentence.

"Nothing."

Draco blinked, visibly surprised and upset by her terse response. "Excuse me?"

"I believe there is nothing. We become nothing. We do not exist." It was Hermione's turn to avoid his eyes. She knew in her bones what he had been hoping for- words like _peace, forgiveness, _and _hope._Unfortunately, he had asked the wrong person.

"That…that's terrible." Malfoy's voice was quiet- _shaken_.

She couldn't ignore that quaver in his voice- she forced herself to look at him long and hard, eyes grave and questioning. "Is it?"

Malfoy did not respond, instead watching their black shadows slide across the ground as they meandered along the road. Hermione was struck by how childish his face looked in that instant, how terrified and uncertain. She stopped abruptly, standing still in the middle of the lane.

"How much do you know about elements and human bodies?"

Draco turned on the spot, eyeing her warily as if waiting for her to deal another shattering blow to his reality. "Not much. That's only useful Healers and Necromancers."

Hermione's lips tugged down in distaste. "Look up, please, and listen."

Draco's wary expression turned to a flat, distrustful glare. "Why?"

Stepping forward a fraction of an inch, Hermione reached out and shoved his chin upward with one finger. "Just look and listen." She expected him to struggle, to close his eyes or turn his face away. He did not.

"Muggle scientists-" she was impressed when he did not scoff or snort, but continued to stare upward at the stars, "believe that the universe started with an explosion of energy called the Big Bang. It only took the universe three seconds to come into existence. All of the matter, ever, came to be in that amount of time. Galaxies and stars and everything."

His eyebrows were drawn together in the center, confused- he didn't understand what this had to do with dying. She fought back a smile.

"A supernova occurs when a star cools and implodes- sending masses of elemental stardust flying across the universe. Eventually, all of those remnants clump together with remnants from other stars and form a new star somewhere else."

Hermione was no longer watching his face- her eyes had slid up to watch the sky above as well. Amazing, beautiful, how everything came full circle. Maybe he would see.

"There are about ninety-four natural elements found on earth, and twelve of those are in the human body. Out of those twelve elements, only one does not occur in stars."

Here- she needed to see his face, see if he understood why she was telling him this. Maybe he thought she was just being a know-it-all. Maybe he wasn't even listening. She watched what she could see of his upturned face, pale frowning lips and narrowed silver eyes. Unreadable.

"The rest of our body- ninety-three percent of our body mass- is stardust. We are made of the stuff of stars- exploded somewhere billions of years away…yet here we are."

Her breath caught in her throat as she watched him, waiting for some sign of acceptance or dismissal. Eons seemed to pass, light years in which he simply stared up at the deep blue mass above them and breathed and existed. The earth was still and silent, and time stood perched and still, waiting for this man.

Then she saw it.

In the crease beneath his steel-grey eye, moisture had pooled, white-silver in the starlight. Even as she watched with bated breath, unsure, the weight of the liquid dragged itself down his cheek, leaving a long glistening streak down his pale face.

"Please," he whispered, voice shaking and cracked, "please keep talking."

Hermione did not even have to think- words spilled from her lips as if the stars themselves were pouring them into her blank and waiting mind- as if the universe pulsed and pulled around this one broken blonde man, crying in a deserted lane somewhere in the middle of the countryside.

"Carl Sagain was a genius. He said beautiful things about the universe…and humans as well. He said we are all star-stuff, and we are the universe's way of coming to know itself. I was terrified when the idea first came into my head- that we stop existing." Hermione couldn't take her eyes off him. He was so…so close to star-stuff; white-blonde hair and polished metal irises; even his skin seemed to echo the faint glow from the blazing heavenly bodies millennia away. A thought, irrational but worrying all the same, seized Hermione, and she stumbled forward as quickly as she could and took his hand.

A spasm rocked through his body, ending in the tiniest tremble in his fingertips where they were pressed to hers. He was anchored now. He would not go floating off to join the stars he so resembled.

"You don't have to believe what I do- I know it's a terrifying thought at first, an eternity of non-existence," Hermione told him, speaking upward to his chin as he was still staring at the sky. "It's just that, for me, an eternity of blowing across the earth and eventually the universe as stardust sounds much better than an eternity of anything else. An eternity is a long, long time after all. " She bit her lip, unnerved by his quiet and the trails of moisture tracking their way down his face.

Instead of responding, he gave her hand the lightest of squeezes, more like a twitch of his fingers, and that was more comforting than any words. It was his tiny, reassuring gesture- _press on, Granger, please_.

"And think about it," Hermione continued quietly, a small smile flickering across her face. "Someday after we've been dead a long, long time- eons, millenia, some measure of time that hasn't even been thought of because it's so vast, who knows- and the earth has disintegrated, either blown to bits by an asteroid or by humanity itself, everyone who has ever been on this earth will be there- floating across space and time."

In her mind, she saw it- the brilliantly complex dark blue universe with its splotches of neon pink gasses and intensely white stars, and there, somewhere in a small corner of the picture was a seemingly insignificant, nearly transparent cloud of dust.

"And just imagine, after we've been there for a million more years, one speck of stardust bumps into another- and they combine. It could be anyone- Cleopatra and Albus Dumbledore. Harry and his cousin Dudley." She paused, eyes drawn to their linked hands. "Even you and I. We combine, and gradually more stardust gathers around us, and someday- we're a star. All of us, the entirety of humanity, together again. No war, no hatred, just stardust shining in the sky."

His fingers were cool in her warm hand, but he seemed to be shining right back at the white-hot stars overhead. All the words of the past few moments faded away, leaving the two to stare up at the glittering canvas above them.

And it felt, though it was all utter speculation, it felt- with their hands linked and their minds tuned to the same ringing note- it felt as if they were destined to meet again somewhere high above themselves, millions of years in the future, one speck of stardust latching on to the other.


End file.
